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YouTube Set to Introduce Paid Subscriptions This Spring
A New Revenue Model For TV Networks and Video Producers
By: Jason Del Rey
Published: January 29, 2013
A new chapter in online video is about to begin. YouTube
is prepping to launch paid subscriptions for individual channels on its video
platform in its latest attempt to lure content producers, eyeballs, and
advertiser dollars away from traditional TV, according to multiple people
familiar with the plans.
YouTube has reached out to a small group of channel
producers and asked them to submit applications to create channels that users
would have to pay to access. As of now it appears that the first paid channels
will cost somewhere between $1 and $5 a month, two of these people said. In
addition to episodic content, YouTube is also considering charging for content
libraries and access to live events, a la pay-per-view, as well as self-help or
financial advice shows.
It's not clear which channels will be part of the first
paid-…

The weekly - sometimes daily - security scares that occur with the Java
programming language are starting to remind me of the old whack-a-mole arcade
game.

Researchers or hackers discover a major flaw in Java. Java's developer, Oracle,
whacks it with a patch. Another mole pops up. Oracle whacks it with a patch.

Many experts say Oracle is losing this game, or isn’t trying very hard to win.
And computer users are paying the price.

When a vulnerable version of Java is active in a Web browser, visiting a
compromised website is all it takes for crooks to sneak malware on to your
computer. In most cases, you won't even know the site is compromised until it's
too late.

Here's how to stay safe: Stop using Java - or stay on top of the upgrades and
use Java a lot more guardedly.

I'm going to help you do just that.

But first: What the heck is Java, and why is it capable of scalding your
computer?

Storing Digital Data
in DNA ·Updated January 24, 2013, 8:41 a.m. ET Technique One Day
May Replace Hard Drives as Web Leads to Information DelugeByGAUTAM NAIKScientists have stored audio and text on fragments of DNA and then
retrieved them with near-perfect fidelity—a technique that eventually may
provide a way to handle the overwhelming data of the digital age. The scientists encoded in DNA—the recipe of life—an audio clip of
Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, a photograph, a
copy of Francis Crick and James Watson's famous "double helix"
scientific paper on DNA from 1953 and Shakespeare's 154 sonnets. They later
were able to retrieve them with 99.99% accuracy. The experiment was reported Wednesday in the journal Nature. "All we're doing is adapting what nature has hit upon—a very
good way of storing information," said Nick Goldman, a computational
biologist at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, England, and
lead au…

Child labour "uncovered" in
Apple's supply chain Internal audit reveals 106
children employed at 11 factories making Apple products in past year Juliette Garside, telecoms
correspondent The Guardian, Friday 25
January 2013 14.22 EST Apple has discovered
multiple cases of child labour in its supply chain, including one Chinese
company that employed 74 children under the age of 16, in the latest
controversy over the technology giant's manufacturing methods. An internal audit found a
flipside to the western consumer's insatiable thirst for innovative and
competitively priced gadgets. It uncovered 106 cases of underage labour being
used at Apple suppliers last year and 70 cases historically. The report follows
a series of worker suicides over working conditions at Foxconn, the Taiwanese
company that assembles must-have products such as the iPad and iPhone, and
lethal explosions at other plants. Apple's annual supplier
report – which monitors nearly 400 suppliers – foun…

France studies new tax
measures on web giants By Leila Abboud PARIS | Fri Jan 18, 2013
12:26pm EST (Reuters) - France plans
to study different measures to collect more tax from global Internet companies,
including a new type of levy on the personal data of web surfers that the likes
of Google and Facebook use to make money. In a 150-page report
commissioned by the government of Socialist President Francois Hollande in
July, two experts laid out a series of recommendations for measures at the
national and international level to limit technology companies' ability to
avoid tax legally. The government said it
would now evaluate the feasibility of the various policies with the aim of
proposing a law by year-end to modify how global Internet companies are taxed
in France. It added that France would work with countries in the G20, the OECD
and the European Union to adapt international tax regimes to the "new
reality of the Internet economy". "This report exposes
the off-shoring…

The latest Java zero-day hole ascended to the level of a national security threat. Has the tipping point for Java finally come?
Why the Java threat rang every alarm
By InfoWorld Tech Watch
Created 2013-01-18 03:00AM
If the IT industry had a color-coded threat-level
advisory system, the alerts would have spiked to red this week -- and in a way
they did when the Department of Homeland Security, no less, urged users to
disable or uninstall Java [1] because of a serious security vulnerability.
Judging by the ensuing avalanche of ink (mea culpa for
adding to the pileup), you might think this attack took the industry by
surprise. Far from it -- as Twitter engineer and security expert Charlie Miller
told Reuters [2], "It's not like Java got insecure all of a sudden. It's
been insecure for years." Java was responsible for half of all cyber
attacks [3] last year in which hackers broke into computers by exploiting
software bugs, according to Kaspersky Lab, and diatribes again…

Jan 18, 6:32 PM EST
IRS LOSES LAWSUIT IN FIGHT AGAINST TAX PREPARERS
BY MATTHEW BARAKAT ASSOCIATED PRESS
FALLS CHURCH, Va. (AP) -- A federal judge on Friday
barred the IRS from imposing a series of new regulations, including a
competency exam, on hundreds of thousands of tax preparers.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington ruled
against the IRS in favor of three tax preparers who filed suit last year with
the help of a libertarian legal group, the Arlington, Va.-based Institute for
Justice.
Since 2011, in response to what it says has been a
growing problem of poorly done returns, the IRS has sought to impose a series
of new regulations on tax preparers. That included a requirement to pass a
qualifying exam, paying an annual application fee, and taking 15 hours annually
of continuing-education courses.
Attorneys and certified public accountants would have
been exempt from the regulations.
The Institute for Justice argued that the IRS lacked the
statutory authority to impose…

CBS Forced CNET To Drop Its 'Best Of CES 2013' Winner,
The DISH Hopper - Reporter quits over CBS interference
1/14/2013 @ 4:10PM
The ‘Hopper’ not only could have been a contender, it
would have won CNET’s Best of CES award. Instead, CBS told the editors to do a
re-vote.
According to a report by The Verge, CNET editors had
already voted on their Best of CES winner when news came down from corporate
that they had to change their vote and drop the “Hopper” entirely.
The device, developed by the DISH Network, gives
television viewers the ability to “hop” over commercials. It’s hardly
surprising that it might win a few awards—after all, skipping commercials is
one reason people have DVRs, TiVo and used to record shows on their VCRs
way-back-when.
But apparently CBS (along with a number of other major
networks) are in the midst of litigation with DISH over the Hopper, and when
the suits at the top learned that the pesky editorial staff at CNET had picked
the Hopper for the Best of…

Holiday PC sales slide for
first time in 5 years By Bill Rigby 1/11/2013 Holiday-season sales of
personal computers fell for the first time in more than five years, according
to tech industry tracker IDC, as Microsoft's new Windows 8 operating system
failed to excite buyers and many instead opted for tablet devices and
smartphones. The slump caps a miserable
year for PC makers such as Hewlett-Packard Co, Lenovo Group and Dell Inc, which
saw the first annual decline for more than a decade with no immediate signs of
relief. It underscores an
unspectacular launch for the latest version of the Windows franchise, which
Microsoft is banking on to fight off incursions into the PC arena by
touch-friendly devices such as Apple Inc's iPad. "The sense is that
until Windows 8 is fully installed and prices start to come down, we will be in
this state of negative dynamics in the PC market," said Aaron Rakers, an
analyst at Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. Still, analysts warn
against countin…